The bookkeeper for a family-run construction business decided to switch from QuickBooks to Ambrook. With more flexibility for her categorization needs and AI features that actually fit her workflow, she gained more trust in the numbers and the system.

Meet the team

Located in Montana’s Gallatin Valley, KB Building & Supply has been locally owned and operated for more than 30 years. Keith Bright, whose family has been part of the community for generations, started the company and later brought on his son Jack as its general manager.

Their crew of 10 specializes in post-frame construction, building everything from shops to hay storage, horse shelters, calf shelters, and stall facilities and arenas. They’ll make almost any building custom at a client’s request. "Last year we did a really involved chicken coop and a goat shed," said their office manager, Ella.

Ella joined the team about two and a half years ago to run the office and the books. Her role encompasses everything from managing KB’s social media to delivering materials, running payroll and doing job costing, plus all else in between.

When she started, Ella didn’t have a bookkeeping background, but she never let that faze her. "I came into this job not knowing anything about bookkeeping, but I'm very self-reliant, and I just figured it out and made it work.” Now, she manages some of the most important workflows in the business, including tracking job costs and cash flow.

The challenge: Handling complexity and uncertainty in QuickBooks

Ella used to do KB’s books with QuickBooks Online. Some parts of the platform were a positive experience, but over time, small workflows started to feel overly complicated and unforgiving.

Ella would make an edit to a transaction, for example, without realizing that QuickBooks had automatically made other changes that messed up her records. "It made me want to rip my hair out," she said. "You edit one thing and you wreck everything else, and you don't know you wrecked it until later down the line."

Most frustrating for Ella was when QuickBooks would make changes to the platform without giving her any heads-up. Once, because of a software update she wasn’t warned about, Ella had to make a last minute change in her bookkeeping workflow. “That's when I was like, 'Keith, we have to switch,' and I think Ambrook might be the way to go."

Switching to Ambrook

Ella had been seeing Ambrook on Facebook for a while. It stood out because many of KB’s clients are farmers and ranchers, so the platform felt like it fit their customers’ world while also serving construction businesses. "I've looked at a ton of other tools and Ambrook just made the most sense for us."

When she and Keith officially decided to make the switch, Ella first met with Ashritha Karuturi from Ambrook’s support team to get bank connections and transaction categories set up in the platform.

Then, Ella migrated their data from QuickBooks by hand. She wanted to make sure their books were transferred accurately and preserved the work she had done to keep records organized. "I think it’s from my experience with QuickBooks. I don't trust things transferring properly, so I did it all manually," she said.

In the end, KB’s books transferred right into Ambrook. “It was actually really simple,” Ella explained, and she started using the platform to track transactions, log job costs, and manage bills.

What changed: Simpler tagging and flexible editing

The biggest difference Ella has noticed is a newfound sense of control over the operation’s own financial data.

This is partly because some workflows are less complicated than they were with QuickBooks. She remembered a time recently when a reconciled transaction got tagged to the wrong job, and it took her all of a few seconds to correct it.

But it’s also because Ella feels she can actually make changes to KB’s bookkeeping system without bracing for unforeseen effects. She explained that Ambrook felt designed to embrace variability and the fact that, in the art of bookkeeping, not everything is always set in stone. “Humans make mistakes sometimes,” she said. “Someone changes their mind about how something needs to be categorized, or we want to see the data in a different way.”

With Ambrook, she gained the freedom to make those edits intentionally, in ways that help KB’s crew better understand their numbers and profitability. And she no longer worries about the system making further changes that she didn’t know about or approve. "We're human, we're not robots,” she said. "It feels like QuickBooks is for robots. Ambrook is for humans."

Accurate automations and AI suggestions

Ella also built up her trust in automations and AI-assisted workflows with Ambrook, and they’ve now become a normal part of her bookkeeping.

Before, she was skeptical of AI features in accounting tools because she saw them produce too many inaccurate results and felt that they were introduced all over the place in ways that weren’t actually useful. “You want to trust your system, right? And then it doesn’t give you the right information.” It made her want to stop using automated tools for bookkeeping altogether, because they never seemed to work.

But in Ambrook, she found two AI workflows that integrated well with the routine she already had: Tagging suggestions and AI matching. When she logs in to categorize transactions, many of the tags are suggested for her upfront and she simply needs to review and approve them.

And when transactions post from bills or checks, Ambrook’s AI automatically suggests how to match them, making reconciliation a much simpler process for Ella these days. Above all, she still had the power to make the final calls on anything the system recommended.

Looking forward: A foundation for deliberate growth

The team at KB Building & Supply is clear about their business goals; they aren’t out to chase growth for growth’s sake. "We like being a small business," Ella said, so they want to expand the operation on their own terms. "Small growth is the goal right now."

What they need from a bookkeeping system, then, is financial data they can deeply trust. That way they can make deliberate decisions about scale: when to hire another building crew to take on more jobs, another shop person to do sheds and shelters, or weekend coverage at the front desk.

For Ella, Ambrook has become that trustworthy foundation:

• Tracked profitability across 28 jobs

• Managed 300 bills in one place with bulk bill pay

• Tagged 1,200+ transactions with support from AI suggestions

Ella is looking into other ways to improve their financial management. For example, she’s interested in issuing Ambrook spending cards to the crew so they can easily make business purchases and immediately capture receipts on their phones. Because with full control over the numbers, Ella and the team can now focus on growing the operation in ways they care about and continue to serve their community.